Rev. Doctor Birch’s, Market Rodborough, if you read this, will you please send me a line, and let me know what was the joke Mr. Merryman made about having his dinner?  You remember well enough.  But do I want to know?  Suppose a boy takes a favorite, long-cherished lump of cake out of his pocket, and offers you a bite?  Merci!  The fact is, I don’t care much about knowing that joke of Mr. Merryman’s.

But whilst he was talking about his dinner, and his mutton, and his landlord, and his business, I felt a great interest about Mr. M. in private life—­about his wife, lodgings, earnings, and general history, and I dare say was forming a picture of those in my mind—­wife cooking the mutton:  children waiting for it; Merryman in his plain clothes, and so forth; during which contemplation the joke was uttered and laughed at, and Mr. M., resuming his professional duties, was tumbling over head and heels.  Do not suppose I am going, sicut est mos, to indulge in moralities about buffoons, paint, motley, and mountebanking.  Nay, Prime Ministers rehearse their jokes; Opposition leaders prepare and polish them; Tabernacle preachers must arrange them in their minds before they utter them.  All I mean is, that I would like to know any one of these performers thoroughly, and out of his uniform:  that preacher, and why in his travels this and that point struck him; wherein lies his power of pathos, humor, eloquence;—­that Minister of State, and what moves him, and how his private heart is working;—­I would only say that, at a certain time of life certain things cease to interest:  but about some things when we cease to care, what will be the use of life, sight, hearing?  Poems are written, and we cease to admire.  Lady Jones invites us, and we yawn; she ceases to invite us, and we are resigned.  The last time I saw a ballet at the opera—­oh! it is many years ago—­I fell asleep in the stalls, wagging my head in insane dreams, and I hope affording amusement to the company, while the feet of five hundred nymphs were cutting flicflacs on the stage at a few paces’ distance.  Ah, I remember a different state of things!  Credite posteri.  To see those nymphs—­gracious powers, how beautiful they were!  That leering, painted, shrivelled, thin-armed, thick-ankled old thing, cutting dreary capers, coming thumping down on her board out of time—­that an opera-dancer?  Pooh!  My dear Walter, the great difference between my time and yours, who will enter life some two or three years hence, is that, now, the dancing women and singing women are ludicrously old, out of time, and out of tune; the paint is so visible, and the dinge and wrinkles of their wretched old cotton stockings, that I am surprised how anybody can like to look at them.  And as for laughing at me for falling asleep, I can’t understand a man of sense doing otherwise.  In my time, a la bonne heure.  In the reign of George IV., I give you my honor, all the dancers at the opera